The Trusts and Estates Practice Group provides estate planning, estate administration, and related services to individuals, charitable organizations, foundations, and corporate fiduciaries such as banks and trust companies.
Estate planning services include the preparation of wills, trusts, and associated documents. After careful consultation with clients, we design estate plans to ensure the appropriate disposition of clients' assets and the orderly and cost‑effective administration of clients' estates. We give particular attention to reducing estate, gift, and generation‑skipping transfer taxes and assist clients with lifetime gifting programs, including planning for the transition of family‑owned businesses from older to younger generations and planning for charitable giving and the use of private foundations. Gifting strategies include the use of life insurance trusts, qualified personal residence trusts, generation-skipping trusts, family limited partnerships and limited liability companies, "tax defective" grantor trusts, grantor retained annuity trusts, and charitable remainder and charitable lead trusts. Because of escalating health care costs and increased longevity, we also emphasize planning for disability, including using powers of attorney and living wills and planning for eligibility for government health care benefits.
Additionally, our attorneys assist executors and administrators of decedents' estates in carrying out their legal duties. We not only provide our services to individuals, but also we represent corporate fiduciaries in controversies involving trust and estate beneficiaries. Our services include preparing and filing all documents and accountings to commence, administer, and formally close estate proceedings; ascertaining and paying valid estate debts; collecting and transferring estate assets to the appropriate beneficiaries; resolving death tax and fiduciary income tax issues; filing death tax and fiduciary income tax returns; and handling tax examinations and audits, where necessary. We use postmortem tax planning to minimize taxes and to address liquidity issues. We also represent clients in will caveats and similar disputes involving the administration of trusts and estates, including representing corporate fiduciaries concerning claims made by beneficiaries of trusts and estates.
Beyond the many services the Trusts and Estates Practice Group provides, our attorneys work to keep our clients informed about trust and estate issues. We regularly prepare articles for the firm newsletter, and we send out bulletins to clients throughout the year. Our attorneys also speak on trust and estate issues at many seminars.
An attorney in this group is included in The Best Lawyers in America and in "Legal Elite," a list by Business North Carolina of the 200 best attorneys in the state, and is a Fellow in the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel, the premier organization of estate planning and probate lawyers in the country. Three attorneys are certified by the North Carolina State Bar as Board Certified Specialists in Estate Planning and Probate Law.
Attorneys in the Trusts and Estates Practice Group work closely with other attorneys in the firm. The group draws on the experience of other groups including Family Law (to handle cases such as equitable distribution and divorce and remarriage situations in which premarital and postmarital agreements and spousal trusts are desired), Real Estate (for real property issues in planning and administering estates), Business (for matters involving the formation, transfer, and valuation of business entities such as limited liability companies, limited partnerships, and corporations), Litigation (to handle special proceedings before the clerk of court and trust and estate litigation in trial and appellate courts), and Tax (for assistance with complex income tax issues and the formation and administration of private foundations). As a full-service law firm, we have the capability of providing all legal services necessary to our clients.
Our attorneys bring to their work a range of complementary experience including the following: trust officer in Retirement Plan Services for First Citizens Bank; law clerk to the Honorable Robert F. Orr, North Carolina Court of Appeals; community college instructor; member of numerous boards of local nonprofit organizations; authors and lecturers to civic groups and at continuing legal education seminars on topics relating to estate planning and administration and tax planning.
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